I've followed those exact steps on three different machines with IE7 and IE6 and cannot make the page reload happen. Nor can I get the text to clear in Quick Reply box.
From your screenshots it looks like your browser is not handling the anchor properly. What *should* be happening, is not that the page is reloading, but rather than the page just scrolls down to the reply box. If you're mistaking the page scrolling to the reply box (which is what happens with #reply shows up in your address bar) then the page is not reloading at all, and it's a problem with the editor. If the page is actually reloading (as in you see a progress bar at the bottom and you can tell the page is physically reloading) then you have a problem with your installation of IE.
I'll see if I can manually force it to break today, just to rule out any possibilities that the script is causing the issue. If I can't force it to break, I'm going to try a different method of 'scrolling' back down to the quick reply box. So check back in about two hours and I'll reply with a followup.